By any reasonable musical standard, this album is a fucking mess. I mean, this is the one and only real full-length from Beherit, who were loathed by the BM community back when they were still a live band. This is the band that took money to record a debut album, then spent the money on booze and spliff and slapped their old demos together to make The Oath Of Black Blood. And this, Drawing Down The Moon, is the only real album they managed before they turned into an ambient band entirely.

The sound quality here is awful, the guitars garbled and muted, the vocals are run through a shitload of effects, the bass is too loud, on and on. This is one of the most unprofessional recordings I have ever heard. And yet. . . Beherit captured something here, they took the no-doubt inebriated pieces and made a whole that somehow captures the essence of Black Metal. There may never have been anything else as kvlt as these frozen hymns to evil and death, with a sound that goes way beyond 'minimal' and sounds like echoes of black magic bubbling up from the bowels of the earth. The vocals are overproduced, and yet so weird they enthrall anyway, ranging from grunts to screams to arcane whispering like Satan in your ear. Sound effects, chants, instrumental bits, muttered invocations to who knows what – this should just be an unlistenable pile of garbled crap, but somehow it isn't. Somehow Beherit made a classic – probably by virtue of being too fucked-up to get in the way of their instincts and choke off the delightful malign insanity that permeates every second of this album.

This album is not for the uninitiated, and not for the faint-hearted. The first time I listened to this I wondered "what the fuck were these guys thinking when they recorded this?" But I keep coming back to it, and I don't know if I have a single album more intensely kvlt than this. A sprawling, lurching disaster of an album, pure Black Metal magic.